Solving the Urban Crisis: Through Sustainable Community Development

Our nation’s inner cities are grappling with a host of highly complex problems and lack adequate economic resources to solve them. Eroding infrastructures, inadequate housing and health care, failing schools, unsafe streets, and high unemployment are some of the issues that a panel of new urban leaders discussed at a day-long conference at the Brookings Institution. Joyce Ladner, a Brookings senior fellow, hosted some of the nation’s most effective urban problem solvers, discussing their best practices in coping with the nation’s most critical urban problems through sustainable community development.

They examined the folowing questions:

• Who will be the next generation of urban leaders and what will be their primary challenges?
• How can the best practices of effective urban leaders be replicated and serve as models in other cities?
• What role will government play in the funding of community development organizations?
• Are charter schools a viable long-term alternative to the current structure of public schools?
• How are local urban economies linked to larger regional issues?